Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent

by Tom Holland

The seductions of high society, delicate and perfumed as they were, exerted on those who could afford them an almost spiritual allure. Taste as well as breeding had become the mark of the elite.

Yet what defined it also served to threaten it. The passion for luxuries, most of which had to be shipped from glamorous locations overseas, inevitably boosted the fortunes of those with their fingers in the import–export trade.

Capital, which had previously been tied up almost exclusively in the estates of the nobility...

By 600 BC, a momentous innovation was being introduced to the cities of Ionia: coinage. Over the following decades, it would cross the Ae...

Eupatrid,

‘Kakoi’,

déclassé nobleman

The Spartans themselves, of course, once so convulsed by precisely such complaints, had long since evolved their own remedy.

590s BC,

agrarian crisis.

Never before had the property market been so fluid. As impoverished noblemen, threatened with the loss of their patrimony, tightened the screws on their tenants, so misery was passed down the food-chain to the very poorest, from the mansions of great families to the barest, rockiest plots.

As it worsened, the land famine drew an inevitable recourse. Just over the straits from southern Attica, temptingly, indeed irresistibly, close, lay the island of Salamis.

Ajax’s old kingdom

citizens of Megara,

Cor...

laid claim to ...

The two cities duly went to war. Athens was defeated and forced to sue for peace. All the more galling for the vanquished was the fact that Megara, tiny as she was, ranked only as a third-rate powe...

Spectral figures began to be glimpsed on the streets of the city, seeming portents of imminent ruin. So desperate did the situation appear that the Athenians, with that Greek enthusiasm for one-man think-tanks best exemplified by the tales told of Lycurgus, began to cast around for a sage.

In 594 BC,11 Solon,

archonship, the city’s supreme magistracy,

Skilled though he was at tailoring his pitch to his audience, however, Solon was no mere idle trimmer.

It was evident to Solon that the two great crises facing Athens, agrarian and military, both sprang from the same root: rural impoverishment was enfeebling the reserves of Attic manpower; farmers were sinking ever deeper into serfdom.

Solon, had he displayed the calculating mercilessness of a Lycurgus, could easily have sponsored this trend, and condemned his city’s poor to a permanent helotage. Instead, he chose to redeem them.

Most landlords, naturally enough, were outraged; but Solon, playing the selfless sage to the hilt, argued sternly that his reforms were in their interests, too.

After all, without the bedrock provided by a free peasantry, what hope was there of capturing Salamis, or of preserving Athens from social meltdown, or of winning for the city a rank commensurate with her size?

Eupatrids,

Kakoi;

the poor, although granted membership of a citizens’ assembly, denied the privilege of speaking in it. It was a triumph not for revolu...

The boast, in short, of an instinctive centrist.

eunomia:

Far from launching a novel political experiment, Solon saw himself as engaged in an act of restoration and repair. With a talent for reinventing history that would have done credit to a Spartan, he persuaded his city that the constitution he had drafted was in fact the very one she had possessed in her distant past.

Before relinquishing power and departing Athens for a ten-year Mediterranean cruise,* Solon decreed that his laws should remain in force for a minimum of a century. No sooner had he set sail, however, than familiar problems began to raise their ugly heads.

Eunomia was not as easily maintained in Athens as the departed Solon had cared to hope. Their powers left untrammelled, the nobility swaggered and feuded just as they had always done.

war for S...

Despite all Solon’s efforts, Athens remained very much the ...

Even so, his reforms had set in train something momentous. Moved by the legends of his city, and by her claims to antiquity and to the favour of the gods, Solon had taken for granted that here ...

Nothing, of course, like the spectacle of another’s servitude to boost one’s self-esteem:

Eupatrid.

Yet the rich, even though they still hugged political power to themselves, could not entirely afford to ignore him and his fellows.

The poor may have been silent in the Assembly – but not without a vote. ‘For in their hands lay the power to elect officials, and to review their performances

Clearly, a new and intriguing cross-current had been added to the endless swirl of aristocratic rivalries. How best to negotiate it was a challenge that every ambitious nobleman would henceforward have to meet.

Eupatrid,

It was no surprise that Athena should have chosen the Acropolis as her residence. For a start, there was the view. Five hundred feet above the rest of Athens, even a mortal could see for miles around.

Phalerum,

Mount Aigaleos;

mountain, Pentelikon,

Two trails circumvented the mountain, one winding northwards, the other circling south. Noblemen, in particular, heading out from Athens, were frequent travellers on the loop around Pentelikon – for beyond it, level and beach-fringed, lay the perfect location for one of the aristocracy’s favourite sports. Horses and their trainers flourished at Marathon.

Unpaved, often rocky, and invariably encrusted with filth, the streets of Athens wound and twisted without plan.

560s BC,

There were always wagons in the city, piled high with wares, and especially pottery, for in ceramics Athenian craftsmen now led the world. One area of the city was even named after it – although, in truth, the Ceramicus was just as famous for its cemetery and cheap whores.